Courtesy of WhoWhatWhy Close Authorship About 2 million cooling towers are across the U.S. Noya plans to use existing towers to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This story originally appeared in WhoWhatWhy and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story. In mid-August, a cooling tower in San Leandro, California, assumed a new and unusual role. Its original duty had been to remove excess heat from the pasteurization process at a creamery run by Alexandre Family Farms. Now, after a retrofit installed by the San Francisco tech startup Noya, the tower also captures carbon dioxide out of the air. With some 2 million more cooling towers hidden in plain sight across the United States, Noya is set on scaling its technology to levels that can make a serious dent in atmospheric carbon levels. By the company’s estimates, the nation’s towers could together capture 7 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. And by repurposing existing towers instead of building new ones, Noya can lower the immense upfront expense that hampers other companies involved in what’s known as direct air capture. Cooling towers circulate […]
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